The Rag Blog

On September 23rd, Marco Tulio Portela Ramirez, a union organizer, was gunned down outside his home as he prepared to go to work at the Bandegua banana plantation, a subsidiary of Del Monte Fresh Produce.

The production of bananas in Guatemala takes place in large monoculture plantations where labor conditions are very poor. Workers receive low wages which often don’t cover the basic needs of their families and endure long 12-hour work days and exposure to dangerous chemicals. Furthermore, employees lack the freedom to organize independent trade unions and negotiate agreements with their employers in order to improve these working conditions. Those who have tried to organize have come under attack from both transnational banana companies and independent banana producers. Illegal firings, plantation closures, temporary contracts, civil law suits, trumped up criminal charges, and violence targeting union leaders have all become commonplace. So far in 2007, four unionists have been assassinated in Guatemala and no charges have been made against the guilty parties.

According to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), the Guatemalan Constitution recognizes workers’ freedom of association and states that all workers retain the right to form and join trade unions. Workers have the right to organize and bargain collectively under the condition that 25% of the total workers are in agreement and possess the right to strike provided that 50% support the strike.

The Constitution also provides for a judicial system to rule specifically on violations of the Labor Code. Unfortunately, the labor courts in Guatemala are overrun with backlogged cases that can drag on for years. Even when they issue rulings, the courts have insufficient power to ensure that their decisions are respected. Consequently, employers tend to dismiss the Labor Code and are rarely held accountable for illegal firings, negligent work conditions and violence against union organizers.

Del Monte, the third largest producer of bananas, is owned and controlled by the Chilean-based IAT Group (based in the United Arab Emirates), which maintains its headquarters in Miami, Florida. As of 2005, Del Monte controlled about 15% of the world banana trade. Along with the other major banana producers like Chiquita and Dole, they yield a great deal of power in Latin America and can sell bananas to the northern markets at an extremely cut-rate price. According to a French research institute CIRAD, “only 12% of the final retail price stays in the producing countries. An even smaller proportion goes to small farmers (5-7%) or to plantation workers (1-3%)”. The rest is profit in the pockets of the CEO’s and investors.

Bandegua, the Guatemalan subsidiary of Del Monte, is one of many companies with a long history of targeting trade unionists. In 1999, Bandegua dismissed 900 workers who were involved in the Banana Workers Union of Izabal (SITRABI), the oldest and one of the most powerful unions in Guatemala. On October 13th of that year, a heavily armed attack was led against the union organizers who were planning a massive protest in response to the dismissals. Consequently, seven members of SITRABI fled to the US to defend their lives and pursued a case against Bandegua. As a response, the US government placed Guatemala’s trade benefits on probation until Guatemalan courts convicted the criminals. Unfortunately, due to the sustained violence in Guatemala, the seven organizers continue to live in the US.

On March 7th, 2000, The International Union of Food and Agriculture Workers (UIF) signed an agreement with Del Monte Fresh Produce, which set up local negotiations between Bandegua and SITRABI and committed the company to respecting minimum labor standards. The new agreement ensured that all 900 workers who were illegally fired be allowed to return to their jobs and explicitly stated that all workers had the right to join SITRABI.

Although all parties signed the agreement, acts of violence and intimidation continue. In November of 2006, Cesar Humberto Guerra, the Labor and Conflicts Secretary of SITRABI, was followed by three armed men while driving through the Chicasaw banana plantations in a vehicle owned by SITRABI. The men fired their guns in the air and threw a stone at the windshield of the car.

In July, 2007, military officers forcibly entered a SITRABI union meeting demanding to know the identity of the union’s leaders, the size of its membership and the nature of its occupation. In response, SITRABI filed complaints with the Public Ministry and the Ministry of Defense in Guatemala, who promised there would be an “internal investigation.” According to a statement by the Solidarity Center from September 18, “Military officers had been disciplined by the Ministry of Defense in response to SITRABI complaints about the unlawful entry.”

Five days later, as Marco Tulio Portela Ramirez prepared to go to work at the Bandegua banana plantation, he was brutally gunned down in front of his house by armed, masked men carrying high caliber weapons. Marco was the Secretary of Culture and Sport at SITRABI and his brother, Noé Ramirez, is the General Secretary. According to STITCH, a nationwide group of women organizing for social justice, SITRABI strongly believes that this killing is directly related to their fight to end the intimidation and harassment of the union.

In his statement on September 30th, Noé Ramirez declared, “At the wake and burial of my brother’s mortal remains, I saw how hundreds of workers who were there with us cried at the loss of a fellow unionist, but also how we all committed ourselves to continue forward with our struggle, refusing to be silenced, because we are not alone: we are supported by allies all over the world….I would like to ask you all to keep pressuring the government and the rest of the Guatemalan authorities so that they will immediately investigate and solve Marco Tulio’s murder, and punish both the material and intellectual perpetrators of this crime and their accomplices.”

In response to this assassination, Solidarity Center Executive Director Ellie Larson said, “The systematic attacks on SITRABI constitute backsliding on worker rights enforcement in Guatemala. No worker should lose his life for exercising a fundamental right to participate in a union. Together we must break down the wall of impunity and rebuild respect for worker and human rights.”

This is John Pilger’s address to a London meeting, ‘Freedom Writ Large’, organized by PEN and the Writers Network of Burma, on October 25.

10/27/07 “ICH’ — — Thank you PEN for asking me to speak at this very important meeting tonight. I join you in paying tribute to Burma’s writers, whose struggle is almost beyond our imagination. They remind us, once again, of the sheer power of words. I think of the poets Aung Than and Zeya Aung. I think of U Win Tin, a journalist, who makes ink out of brick powder on the walls of his prison cell and writes with a pen made from a bamboo mat – at the age of 77. These are the bravest of the brave.

And what honor they bring to humanity with their struggle; and what shame they bring to those whose hypocrisy and silence helps to feed the monster that rules Burma.

I had planned tonight to read from my last interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, but I decided not to – because of something Suu Kyi said to me when I last spoke to her. “Be careful of media fashion,” she said. “The media like this sentimental version of life that reduces everything down to personality. Too often this can be a distraction.”

I thought about that, and how typically self effacing she was, and how right she was.

In my view, the greatest distraction is the hypocrisy of those political figures in the democratic West, who claim to support the Burmese liberation struggle. Laura Bush and Condoleezza Rice come to mind. “The United States,” said Rice, “is determined to keep an international focus on the travesty that is taking place in Burma.”

What she is less keen to keep a focus on is that the huge American company, Chevron, on whose board of directors she sat, is part of a consortium with the junta and the French company, Total, that operates in Burma’s offshore oil fields. The gas from these fields is exported through a pipeline that was built with forced labor and whose construction involved Halliburton, of which Vice President Cheney was Chief Executive.

For many years, the Foreign Office in London promoted business as usual in Burma. When I interviewed Suu Kyi I read her a Foreign Office press release that said, “Through commercial contacts with democratic nations such as Britain, the Burmese people will gain experience of democratic principles.”

She smiled sardonically and said, “Not a bit of it.”

In Britain, the official public relations line has changed, but the substance of compliance and collusion has not. British tour firms – like Orient Express and Asean Explorer – are able to make a handsome profit on the suffering of the Burmese people. Aquatic – a sort of mini Halliburton – has its snout in the same trough, together with Rolls Royce and all those posh companies that make a nice earner from Burmese teak.

When the last month’s uprising broke out, Gordon Brown referred to the sanctity of what he called “universal principles of human rights”. He has said something similar a letter sent to this meeting tonight. It is his theme of distraction. I urge you not be distracted.

When did Brown or Blair ever use their close connections with business – their platforms at the CBI and in the City London – to name and shame these companies that make money on the back of the Burmese people? When did a British prime minister call for the European Union to plug the loopholes of arms supply to Burma, stopping, for example, the Italians from supplying military equipment? The reason no doubt is that the British government is itself one of the world’s leading arms suppliers, especially to regimes at war. Tonight (October 25) the Brown government has approved the latest American prelude to its attack on Iran and the ensuing horror and bloodshed.

When did a British prime minister call on its ally and client, Israel, to end its long and sinister relationship with the Burmese junta. Or does Israel’s immunity and impunity also cover its supply of weapons technology to Burma and its reported training of the junta’s most feared internal security thugs? Of course, that is not unusual. The Australian government – so vocal lately in its condemnation of the junta – has not stopped the Australian Federal Police from training Burma’s internal security forces in at the Australian-funded Center for Law Enforcement Cooperation in Indonesia.

10/26/07 “ICH” — – It was a case of mistaken identity. It could have happened to any one of us.

And yet, in 2007 it is hard for us to imagine the ongoing nightmare endured by Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen whose story helped to expose the ugly underbelly of the US-led global war on terror. On October 9th, Masri’s last hope at getting justice in the US was dashed when the Supreme Court declined to review the lower court rulings dismissing his case based on the government’s assertion that to give Masri his day in court would require the disclosure of state secrets and thus harm US national security.

His Kafkaesque plight brings to mind the inquisitorial “justice” meted out by totalitarian regimes. That the High Court refused to hear his case without comment is all too fitting for the silence and secrecy Masri encountered in his search for answers in the US. Now, Masri must turn to the European Court of Justice in the hopes that Europe will afford him the justice he was denied in America. Since the US is not a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, Masri should bring suit against Germany for its complicity in his mistreatment in order to obtain an adjudication affirming the mistreatment he received at the hands of US agents.

The Supreme Court decision, which the New York Times called a “Supreme Disgrace,” in essence accepted the Bush administration’s contention that the judiciary must ‘trust us’ that allowing Masri’s case to proceed would harm national security. But the constitutional rule of law is based on distrust, not trust. That is why, recognizing as axiomatic that ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,’ the Constitution established a system of checks and balances by means of a separation of powers aimed at accountability. By rubber-stamping claims of executive privilege, the judiciary shirks its constitutional duty, and thus fails us all.

Masri’s story has been one of the most widely reported cases of so-called ‘extraordinary rendition’, the practice of secretly abducting suspected terrorists and indefinitely detaining them, often in countries known to torture prisoners. On December 6, 2005 Masri filed a lawsuit in US federal court against former CIA director George Tenet, and others, alleging that the defendants, acting as agents of the US government, kidnapped, wrongfully imprisoned, abused and tortured him. The 44-year-old married father of five alleges that on December 31, 2003 he was forcibly abducted while on holiday in Macedonia, detained incommunicado, handed over to US agents, then beaten, drugged, and taken to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he was interrogated in a cruel and inhuman manner. His allegations have been investigated and substantiated by the German state prosecutor and the Council of Europe, the continent’s human rights watchdog.

It seems that Khaled El-Masri was thought to be Khalid al-Masri, the name given to the CIA by the Hamburg-based terror suspect Ramzi Binalshibh as the person who helped Mohammed Atta’s 9/11 cabal make contact with a senior Qaeda member in Germany. Likely, the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ produced false ‘intelligence’ and they chased a fictive person with reckless abandon. The validity of Masri’s German passport was never checked before he was flown to Afghanistan. German Chancellor Merkel told the press that US Secretary of State Rice acknowledged to her the mistake with Masri. Rice’s staffers subsequently denied any such admission having been made. Rice, like all Bush officials, has refused to comment on Masri’s claims.

Masri’s lawsuit sought an apology and monetary compensation. US District Judge T.S. Ellis III held that Masri’s “private interests must give way to the national interest in preserving state secrets,” adding that if the allegations are true “all fair-minded people must also agree that El-Masri has suffered injuries as a result of our country’s mistake and deserves a remedy.” Indeed, there is no justice without a remedy for a legal wrong. But following the Supreme Court refusal to review his case, it is now a certainty that Masri will never obtain a remedy through the US legal system.

The Masri case reveals much of what has gone wrong in the ‘war on terror.’ The Supremes let stand the March 2nd Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling which upheld Judge Ellis’ dismissal of the lawsuit because it could expose state secrets. These decisions have brought widespread disbelief, disappointment and disgust. Following the Fourth Circuit ruling, ACLU attorney Ben Wizener said: “This is doubly insulting. Everyone knows that Mr. El-Masri was a mistaken victim of the rendition program. He is now a victim of the misuse of the state-secrets privilege.”

Masri’s is not the only such case to be so dismissed. For instance, Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen taken to an Edgar Allan Poe-like secret prison in Syria, also had his case thrown out of US federal court by a state secrets ruling. The Canadian government substantiated Arar’s claims and offered an apology and compensation for its role in his ‘rendition’. Sadly, the current US administration lacks the strength to ever apologize.

The once-obscure state secrets privilege has been expanded and used ever-more since it was created in the 1953 case US v. Reynolds. Information declassified half a century later reveals that the state secrets claim in the Reynolds case was a lie – the government was seeking to hide its mistakes and protect against embarrassment, not to protect the country’s security. This revelation has fueled calls for reform by legal scholars, public interest groups and the American Bar Association. Since 1993, judges have required in-camera review of the disputed documents underlying state secrets claims in less than an eighth of cases, opting instead for blind deference.

On October 11th, the Times opined, “this administration has repeatedly relied upon [the state secrets doctrine] to avoid judicial scrutiny of its lawless action . . . courts need to apply a healthy dose of skepticism to state secrets claims.” Recently, parts of the judiciary have awakened. Federal judges have denied state secrets claims, noting that to defer to a blanket assertion of state secrets would be to abdicate their duty. On October 10th, a federal judge, citing domestic and international law prohibiting torture, barred the transfer of Guantanamo Bay inmate to Tunisia, marking the 1st time the judiciary has blocked the government transfer of a terror detainee. Perhaps this signals a new willingness to question claims of executive privilege.

As part of a community working to instill respect for the rule of law in post-communist Europe, these are challenging times. America should lead by example in assisting new democracies to root out corruption and establish transparency and accountability in governance. Yet its refusal to cooperate with German prosecutors in Masri’s case, the Canadians in Arar’s case, or the Italians in a rendition investigation there, erodes international cooperation. And revelations of secret torture memos, secret prisons, and secretive government under a novel ‘unitary executive’ theory undermine efforts advocating a rule of law agenda.

We owe Khaled El-Masri our gratitude for helping to expose human rights abuses committed in our name. By taking his claim to the European Court of Justice Masri can shed additional light on the self-defeating post-9/11 tactics employed in the US and Europe. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Masri was turned back at the airport without explanation when he flew to the US to appear at his first court hearing, and in the end he was denied review by the Supreme Court without comment. Mr. Masri is reportedly experiencing psychiatric problems today. Let us hope that he has the strength to continue his search for truth and fairness with the European Court of Justice. For we all have a stake in his struggle for justice.

A federal appeals court has concluded that an FBI agent must go to trial on charges he coerced a false confession out of a prime suspect in the 9/11 attacks. But the FBI still insists that its agent did nothing wrong. And the feds swayed the court to suppress that portion of a recent decision detailing how the FBI agent used the threat of torture to break an innocent man.

Abdallah Higazy, a 30-year-old Egyptian student, arrived in New York City to study engineering at the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn on August 27, 2001. A U.S. foreign-aid program reserved and paid for his room at the Millennium Hilton Hotel, next to the World Trade Center. After the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, Higazy hot-footed it out of the hotel. After the terrorist attack, the hotel was sealed.

Three months later, guests were allowed to retrieve their belongings. When Higazy went to the hotel on December 17, he was arrested and accused of possessing an aviation radio. (A hotel security guard reported finding the radio in a safe in his room.) Higazy denied owning the radio. He was arrested as a material witness and locked up in solitary confinement.

Higazy wanted to clear his name so he agreed to take a polygraph test. FBI agent Michael Templeton wired him up for the test but then proceeded to browbeat him for three hours until he finally admitted to owning the radio. Higazy said the FBI agent warned him, “If you don’t cooperate with us, the FBI will … make sure Egyptian security gives your family hell.” The FBI refused to permit Higazy’s attorney, Robert Dunn, to be in the room while he was given the polygraph. After the interrogation, Higazy was “trembling and sobbing uncontrollably,” according to Dunn.

On January 11, 2002, Higazy was indicted for lying to a federal agent. U.S. Attorney Dan Himmelfarb declaimed that “the crime that was being investigated when the false statements [about the radio] were made is perhaps the most serious in the country’s history. A radio that can be used for air-to-air and air-to-ground communication is a significant part of that investigation.” The Washington Post noted that “federal officials paraded [Higazy] before the media as a terrorist.” The feds never bothered checking with the U.S. foreign-aid program to find out whether Higazy’s story about why he was staying at the hotel next to the World Trade Center was true.

The prosecutorial celebration flopped three days later when an American pilot showed up at the Millennium Hilton Hotel and asked for the aviation radio he had left in his room when the hotel was evacuated on 9/11. It soon became apparent that the hotel security guard (a former cop who had been fired by the Newark Police Department) had lied about finding the radio in Higazy’s room. The case collapsed and, a few days later, Higazy was awarded $3 for subway fare and released from jail. The FBI conducted an internal investigation and absolved Templeton of any wrongdoing.

In late 2002 Higazy sued, asserting that the FBI’s coercive interrogation violated his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Federal judge Naomi Buchwald dismissed his case, declaring, “[Agent] Templeton’s conduct and threats as a matter of law cannot be classified as conscience-shocking or constitutionally oppressive.” Perhaps Buchwald believed that as long as Higazy’s mother and sister were not brutalized in front of him during the interrogation, the FBI had done nothing wrong.

A federal appeals court overturned this decision on October 19, declaring that Higazy’s case deserved to go to trial. The original version of the decision detailed the tactics Templeton purportedly used to get Higazy’s confession. Two hours later, the court removed that portion of the decision from the Internet. The redacted portion of the decision (captured by bloggers before it was taken down) noted that the FBI agent admitted to knowing that Egyptian “laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country … yeah, probably about torture, sure.” Thus, Templeton was aware that his threat would terrify Higazy.

The revised court decision replaced such key details with the following mundane notice: “For the purposes of the summary judgment motion, Templeton did not contest that Higazy’s statements were coerced.”

The FBI has long taught its agents that subjects of their investigation have “forfeited their right to the truth,” according to the ethics study guide at the FBI Academy. Perhaps, according to federal lawmen, it is a small step from lying to suspects to threatening to have their kinfolk tortured. The agency has done nothing in the nearly six years since this case began to indicate that the methods used in the Higazy case did not receive the full approval of FBI headquarters.

The initial Higazy arrest and release were landmarks showing how far feds would go to gin up evidence and headlines for the war on terror. The fact that the FBI approved of its agent’s methods — and the fact that a federal judge saw no problem with the interrogation — are further warning signs of constitutional decay. Keep your eyes on this case, because it could help determine how far feds can go to destroy innocent people.

New York, NY – October 19, 2007. Members of MDS New York were joined by students from Pratt, New School and Pace SDS in a street theatre action in NYC’s Times Square. The occasion was the second round of the Iraq Moratorium. Protesters clad as “pro-war zombies” – and the Grim Reaper – turned out on the third Friday in October, 2007 to “help” recruiters. The zombies spoke to passersby, arguing that: “It’s been a long war, business is slow for recruiters and they seem lonely – stop in and say hello.” The zombies worked a two hour shift (union rules?) – exhorting pedestrians to “support endless war”, “give war a chance”, sign up for “only two weekends a month, honest” and to remember that “violence is the answer”. The sarcasm was not lost on three recruiters who came out of their smallish office on “military island” to glare at the ghouls – the zombies agreed that this was the most annoyed they had ever seen the recruiters. Undead Nixon, who made an appearance at the event as well, encouraged the crowd to remember that death and destruction are “underrated” as he gave the hapless recruiters a big thumb’s up.

Complaint Filed Against Former Defense Secretary for Torture, Abuse at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib

Press Release: October 26, 2007, Paris, France – Today, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the French League for Human Rights (LDH) filed a complaint with the Paris Prosecutor before the “Court of First Instance” (Tribunal de Grande Instance) charging former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with ordering and authorizing torture. Rumsfeld was in Paris for a talk sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine.

“The filing of this French case against Rumsfeld demonstrates that we will not rest until those U.S. officials involved in the torture program are brought to justice. Rumsfeld must understand that he has no place to hide. A torturer is an enemy of all humankind,” said CCR President Michael Ratner.

“France is under the obligation to investigate and prosecute Rumsfeld’s accountability for crimes of torture in Guantanamo and Iraq. France has no choice but to open an investigation if an alleged torturer is on its territory. I hope that the fight against impunity will not be sacrificed in the name of politics. We call on France to refuse to be a safe haven for criminals.” said FIDH President Souhayr Belhassen.

“We want to combat impunity and therefore demand a judicial investigation and a criminal prosecution wherever there is jurisdiction over the torture incidents,” said ECCHR General Secretary Wolfgang Kaleck.

“That a criminal State representative should benefit from impunity is always unacceptable. Because the USA is the super power of the beginning of this century and, above all, because it is a democracy, the impunity of Donald Rumsfeld is even more insufferable than that of a Hissène Habré or a Radovan Karadzic”, underlined Jean-Pierre Dubois, LDH President.

The criminal complaint states that because of the failure of authorities in the United States and Iraq to launch any independent investigation into the responsibility of Rumsfeld and other high-level U.S. officials for torture despite a documented paper trail and government memos implicating them in direct as well as command responsibility for torture – and because the U.S. has refused to join the International Criminal Court – it is the legal obligation of states such as France to take up the case.

In this case, charges are brought under the 1984 Convention against Torture, ratified by both the United States and France, which has been used in France in previous torture cases.

French courts therefore have an obligation under the Convention against Torture to prosecute individuals responsible for acts of torture if they are present on French territory (1). This will be the only case filed while he is in the country, which makes the obligations to investigate and prosecute under international law extremely strong.

Rumsfeld’s presence on French territory gives French courts jurisdiction to prosecute him for having ordered and authorized torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

In addition, having resigned from his position of U.S. Secretary of Defense a year ago, Rumsfeld can no longer try to claim immunity as a head of state or government official. Nor can he claim immunity as former state official, as international law does not recognize such immunity in the case of international crimes including the crime of torture.

Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, former commander of Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, submitted written testimony to the Paris Prosecutor for the plaintiffs’ case on Rumsfeld’s responsibility for the abuse of detainees.

This is the fifth time Rumsfeld has been charged with direct involvement in torture stemming from his role in the Bush administration’s program of torture post-9/11.

Two previous criminal complaints were filed in Germany under its universal jurisdiction statute, which allows Germany to prosecute serious international crimes regardless of where they occurred or the nationality of the perpetrators or victims. One case was filed in fall 2004 by CCR, FIDH, and Berlin attorney Wolfgang Kaleck; that case was dismissed in February 2005 in response to official pressure from the U.S., in particular from the Pentagon.

The second case was filed in fall 2006 by the same groups as well as dozens of national and international human rights groups, Nobel Peace Prize winners and the United Nations former Special Rapporteur on Torture. The 2006 complaint was presented on behalf of 12 Iraqi citizens who had been held and abused in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and one Saudi citizen still held at Guantánamo. This case was dismissed in April 2007, and an appeal will be filed against this decision next week.

Two other cases were filed against Rumsfeld in Argentina in 2005 and in Sweden in 2007.

The complaint and the documents attached are available on FIDH Website : here and here.

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Press contact : Karine Appy + 33 1 43 55 14 12 / + 33 1 43 55 25 18 /
+ 33 6 68 42 93 47

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(1) See articles 689 para 1 and 2 of the french Code of Criminal Procedure :
– Article 689-1) In accordance with the international Conventions quoted in the following articles, a person guilty of committing any of the offences listed by these provisions outside the territory of the Republic and who happens to be in France may be prosecuted and tried by French courts. The provisions of the present article apply to attempts to commit these offences, in every case where attempt is punishable.
– Article 689-2 For the implementation of the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted in New York on 10th December 1984, any person guilty of torture in the sense of article 1 of the Convention may be prosecuted and tried in accordance with the provisions of article 689-1.

I have been writing political essays for a few years now. I do so as a reluctant enthusiast, not because I wanted to write on these themes; but because, it seemed to me, that professional journalists were not telling the whole story; that significant parts that would allow people to connect the dots and understand what is happening from a historical perspective, were being deliberately omitted from the official version of current events, and from history.

As propaganda, the elements that are deliberately left out of media are as important as those that are retained. It is propaganda by omission, as much as by content. What people are not told shapes their world view and influences their behavior, as surely as what they are told. Imposed ignorance and selective knowledge go hand in hand to forge public opinion and to shape cultural identity. These conditions set the stage for belligerent government and aggressive nationalism.

It is not coincidental that professional journalists, those who write for profit in the mainstream media, are the least likely to tell us the truth, the whole truth; whereas, free-lance writers, who operate under a different set of rules and out of the mainstream, are more likely to serve the public interest, and tell us what we need to know in order to be a free people, and good world citizens.

Professional journalists are beholden to a code of ethics and personal conduct that free-lance writers are not. Namely, they are part of a fraternity, a part of the cultural orthodoxy, with an incentive in maintaining the established order. The incentive is always financial and professional, and involves creating the acceptance and trust of those in power, which may, when properly executed, even result in the celebrity status of the journalist.

Journalists who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo or advancing their careers do not operate in the public interest. Their purpose is not to inform but to deceive.

When a major news anchor reports upon the invasion and occupation of sovereign nations, uncritically putting forth pentagon propaganda as justification for the attack, he or she is in essence acting in the manner of a celebrity athlete endorsing a product. The basketball star may endorse Nike sneakers, manufactured by indentured servants in foreign sweatshops; while the news anchor is endorsing war and disaster capitalism projected around the world by Lockheed Martin and the Carlyle Group. Both are prostitutes.

Mainstream corporate journalism is not about speaking truth to power, it is about selling products and perceptions. It is about creating a culture of ignorant consumers incapable of distinguishing between propaganda and news, fact and fiction.

This is marketing and perception management masquerading as unbiased, objecting reporting. I call it the big lie.

If the mainstream journalist wants to prosper, if they want to have access to the inner circles of power, they must play the game according to the established rules. They must toe the corporate line, and provide cover for the corporate assault on human freedoms, and the conquest of nature, while keeping hidden agendas concealed from public view. Journalists must be able to sell widely objectionable concepts to the people, packaged in the garments of seductive—often patriotic language, in order to make them palatable.

How many soldiers, outside of those under the private contracts of firms like Blackwater, would voluntarily stake their lives for corporate profits, and the subjugation of a sovereign people, if they knew that is what they are really fighting for, rather than the more popular and desirable goal of freedom or democracy?

Freedom, liberation, and democracy have never been corporate objectives; nor can they ever be the objective of corporate governance. They are only selling points that conceal hidden corporate agendas; the attractive packaging for war, occupation, and privatization, obtained at pubic expense.

If news stories are not believable to the multitudes, if they fail to garner popular support by masking corporate agendas behind deceptive language, the majority of governmental polices and private agendas could not be enacted. If the people knew what was being done in their name, and who is profiting from those policies, there might be widespread opposition and even social upheaval. It would be difficult to field a voluntary military that knows it is fighting for the bottom line of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin, rather than for freedom and democracy, as they are told.

Thus those who would serve in the military as self-ordained patriots are sold a bill of goods. By invading and occupying Iraq, they are, in effect, undermining the very principles they claim to hold sacred, including those set forth in the Constitution and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Likewise, the average US citizen is sold a similar bill of goods in order to garner support for policies they would, presumably, never voluntarily sustain, if they understood them better.

That is the genius of modern capitalism and its impressive marketing apparatus. The results have been breathtaking.

Skillful perception management always precedes empire. Well presented propaganda allows history to be presented as a kind of fairy tale that ignores the horrible things the government has always done in our name, at the behest of corporate America and our wealthiest citizens, which should be too well known to bear reiteration here.

In our capitalist culture, journalism must not be thought of as a reporting of facts, but as marketing propaganda—the selling of ideas that might not otherwise be embraced by those who must carry out hidden agendas, or the people on the receiving end of them. Seen in this way, the US soldier and the Iraqi citizen are both pawns in a rich man’s game: the former as the implementer of unjust war and occupation, the other as the unwilling recipient of them.

The end result for both soldier and Iraqi citizen is tragic: the soldier is told that he or she is protecting their country from foreign threats, something that is patently false; while the innocent Iraqi citizen, defending his or her home from foreign occupation, knows that she or he is not a terrorist, but is treated like one, nevertheless.

Both occupier and the occupied share a common foe, but it is not each other; it is the criminals, aided and abetted by the corporate media, who put them in formal opposition to one another for financial gain.

Our recent history would have been impossible without the consolidation of the media that occurred during the Clinton presidency and has continued ever since. The entire spectra of mainstream media are now under the control of only four or five corporations. We no longer have reporting on local issues stemming from diverse perspectives rooted in local communities, but a monoculture of state and corporate propaganda that betrays the public trust in its pursuit of corporate profits.

Aided by the president and congress, the public owned airwaves were hijacked and are being used against the people by giant multinational corporations.

The result of this media monoculture, as purveyed by the likes of Judith Miller and Tom Brokaw, and countless others, is tragic. And they represent only the tip of the mainstream iceberg. Think of the horrible and shameless lies, the baseless fear and hate that are continuously voiced by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, and the hateful broadcasts that emanate from Bob Jones University, masquerading as Christian theology.

Corporate media is the vanguard of empire and environmental destruction on a global scale.

Unlike its corporate counterpart, reporting truth requires people of unassailable integrity. It requires a thirst for justice with the strength of character to oppose the powerful undertow of manufactured perception and conformity, and the seductive language created to execute the hidden agendas of corrupt governments. Uncovering truth requires commitment to the people, rather than to profit driven corporate agendas.

Only a handful of professional journalists have attained the kind of stature that makes such reportage possible in the United States. Their names are not at all well known, with the possible exception of Seymour Hersch, Robert Fisk, Bill Moyers and Greg Palast.

More often than not, that responsibility falls on the shoulders of independent journalists and unpaid free-lancers. The professional journalist must answer to his/her boss, and portray the corporation that employs them in a favorable light, even if they are profiting from unprovoked war and occupation. In contrast, the free-lancer is bound only by the constraints of conscience, imagination, and ability.

Occasionally, an astonished responder to one of my more poignant essays will tell me that I should forward the piece to the New York Times: to NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, or even the BBC. I never have.

It would be hard for me to imagine any corporation undermining its own profitability by exposing its hidden agendas, and denouncing itself as a commissioner of murder and mayhem, motivated by insatiable greed and a lust for wealth and power that would astonish even the staunchest mafia don. Don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen! Snowballs in hell have a better chance.

Its not that free-lancers like me wouldn’t like to get paid for what we do; it’s that our views do not enhance the bottom line of corporate giants and, in many cases, actually undermine them. Thus it behooves the professional journalist and the corporate media to ignore or discredit us as purveyors of truth and seekers of justice.

Soon it will be an act of sedition to speak truth in this country. Yet, truth will continue to exist, despite all attempts to destroy it.

Whether they admit it or not, virtually all of the best known journalists in the US subscribe to the racist and sexist ideologies of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny, and they go to great lengths to advance these ideas, by presenting them as something other than what they really are. Slight of hand is the rule of mainstream journalism, not the exception.

Conversely, by serving the people, free-lance journalists are, of necessity, undermining the corporate agenda. Thus they are treated as enemies of the state, which has become indistinguishable from the corporation itself. We live in a culture where one cannot value truth and carry forth corporate agendas. Truth is the enemy of empire.

This might also explain why so many unembedded journalists have been deliberately killed in Iraq and the Gaza strip by US and Israeli snipers. The world must not know what the occupiers do, or the propaganda veneer may no longer have its intended effect on the consumers of media.

Speaking truth to power, especially corrupt power, is dangerous business— particularly in war zones and fascist states, like the one evolving in the US.

Corporate media is the vanguard of colonialism and imperialist policy. It plays a key role in preparing the public mind for imperialist wars and occupations and their subsequent puppet governments; it also serves the emerging police state at home that erodes our freedoms, until there is nothing left of them.

Yet, occasionally, even in this artificially constructed myth loving culture, truth wins out simply because someone cares enough to tell it like it is, without sugar coating. Truth matters; and that is—and always will be—of primal importance to some people. Let future historical records show that there was opposition to what was being done in our name, that there were people willing to speak truth to power, to stem the evil tide by standing up for justice, cost what it may.

Future historians of the dominant culture are likely to cast these accounts into the memory hole and pretend that they never existed, carrying forth the myth that the people were always united behind the injustice and tyranny of our time. We saw this in Nazi Germany in the buildup to World War Two, and we are seeing it now in the US.

But a culture that does not value truth and justice is not worth preserving. Such cultures will self destruct and implode upon themselves; the world will eventually unite against them and bring them down. All of the military might in the world, all the subterfuge, is not powerful enough to overcome simple truth.

Any individual who values truth more than lies, who keeps truth alive in his or her heart, despite all efforts to dislodge it from its ethical moorings, is more powerful than even the most advanced weapons systems. Truth emerges unscathed from the rubble of fallen empire as immutable as an inviolable law of nature. Nothing can bring it down because it is real.

If we are to evolve into a justice loving people, truth must become our moral foundation, the basis of our existence as a people. Truth and justice are inseparable partners on the road to liberation from tyranny and fascism.

Concord’s greatest citizen, the poet-philosopher, Henry D. Thoreau, summed it up well: “The one great rule of composition…is to speak the truth. This first, this second, this third; pebbles in your mouth or not.” Perhaps more than anything, that simplistic ability to speak plain truth, and in all languages, is what I most admire about Thoreau. There is much to admire and respect in a man who spoke in those terms, and lived by that simple credo.

Truth is simple and uncomplicated, whereas lies and distortions are complex. Truth stands strong and unwavering without artificial support; lies and propaganda require elaborate schemes and constant propping up, the mask of deception.

More of us must learn the language of truth; we must be its faithful guardians, if we are to be valuable citizens in this world, rather than the useful idiots of empire. By holding truth and justice in the highest regard, we demonstrate that another world is not only possible, but highly probable.

As voracious consumers of media, we must be as careful about what we admit into our minds, as the food we put into our bodies. Food can nourish and sustain us, or it can produce disease and decay. And so it is with media.

To date, we have not been very discriminate, and the result is that we have become a culture of the mentally obese, fed on junk media. Our minds, our souls, have been deliberately poisoned; our perceptions twisted and distorted, our humanity abandoned to the quest for profits and power.

We must purge our minds of junk media and replace it with something more nutritious, if we favor health over disease. Peace is not possible without two essential ingredients: truth and justice. Neither is possible in the absence of the other. We must live as if truth still matters.

Evidently, Blackwater, the now infamous private security company whose hired guns, working for the State Department, mowed down at least 17 Iraqis in a Baghdad square recently, wants to soften its image. (I wonder why?) The New York Times’ Paul von Zielbauer just reported that the company has redesigned its logo. Once, according to him, it was “a bear’s paw print in a red crosshairs, under lettering that looks to have been ripped from a fifth of Jim Beam” on a “menacing” black field. Like Daniel Boone, the company was evidently selling its ability to put “big game” in the crosshairs of its gun sights in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, subtly transformed, the logo is on a white background; the bear’s paw more modest looking; and the crosshairs of that sniper’s rifle have simply disappeared.

The new set of unilateral sanctions against Iran target the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), several of its affiliates involved in construction and economic activities, the Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL), three individuals affiliated with Iran’s Aerospace Industries Organization (AIO), and two state-owned Melli and Mellat banks for proliferation activities. In addition, they target the IRGC Qods Force for providing material support to terrorist organizations (Taliban is the only identified) and state-owned Saderat Bank as a terrorist financier (Saderat was already under sanctions).

Putin has likened the move to an act of a “madman” running around “with a razor blade, waving it around.” But the move shies away from designating either the IRGC or the smaller Qods force as terrorist organization and as such significantly falls short of the US Senate vote which designated the larger IRGC as a terrorist organization. It seems to be a compromise intended not to freak out the Europeans who had balked at the idea of placing the military force of another country on the terrorist list.

Still some see it as a move towards war. But Anthony Cordesman sees the opposite: “[A] warning shot across the bow, not that the U.S. is going to invade Iran, but that Iran has pushed the level of escalation, particularly inside Iraq, to unacceptable levels. In many ways, this kind of warning is more a demonstration of restraint than a signal that we’re going to war.”

It is conceivable that the immediate backdrop to this move was Washington’s unhappiness with Iran’s increased activities in Iraq. But, if so (setting aside the unconvincing public case regarding Iran’s nefarious activities in Iraq), it is not entirely clear how this move will reduce and not increase Iran’s activities unless a clear warning has been given to Tehran about the possibility of war.

I tend to see the move as more of a general political maneuver; on the one hand, to show the Iranian leadership the American resolve to continue the sanctions process and, on the other hand, to placate the war hawks in the Bush administration at least for a while.

The need to keep tightening the sanctions noose arises from the ineffective nature of the sanctions regime. To counter the stated U.S. attempt to isolate it, but more importantly to assure its own security, Iran has pursued a very active strategy vis-à-vis its neighbors, with many which it has long and porous borders. The northern border in particular, shared with former Soviet states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan—not to mention the vast Caspian Sea— is particularly open. Pakistan and Afghanistan borders to the west—both with new land routes into Central Asia and China–are also uncontrolled by the West. Dubai and other Persian Gulf free ports, as well as newly developed facilities on the Sea of Oman guarantee that needed goods will flow into the country if severe trade sanctions are enacted. Dubai is also the place to get around the financial restrictions imposed on Iran. Even the present chaos in Iraq guarantees free flow of goods across Iran’s border (Iraq is reportedly now the second destination for Iran’s non-oil exports).

Those who are pushing for more sanctions know this. They know that so long as neighbors such as the UAE and Turkey are unwilling to give up their lucrative business with Iran, the sanctions regime will not harm Iran enough to abandon its stance. They also know that given Iran’s long borders, the sanctions in place will be adjusted to in a short period of time. So for Iran to feel any kind of political heat the sanctions noose has to be tightened periodically.

This does not mean that sanctions do not harm Iran economically; they just don’t harm it enough. High oil prices and Iran’s relationship with neighbors give Iran sufficiently versatile tools in the cat and mouse game that is being played between the US and Iran. There is no doubt that the US is the physically more powerful cat in this game but the mouse, so to speak, simply has too many holes to hide in and is difficult to catch precisely because of the versatility of tools at its disposal.

The State and Treasury folks keep hoping that by doing something they will place pressure on Iran’s contested political environment, ultimately convincing those sectors of Iranian elite who are worried about Iran’s deteriorating economic conditions to step up to the plate and force a change in Iran’s policies regarding nuclear enrichment. This is nothing short of wishful thinking so long as the US offer of diplomatic engagement is based on the precondition of changed Iranian behavior and policies before talks begin.

Out of necessity or choice, the current Iranian leadership has decided to hobble along in the energy sector (through attempted cooperative activities with a few European companies and some Asian companies from China, Malaysia, and even India), subvert sanctions through its vast open borders, forego a more coherent economic vision delineated in Iran’s Third and more so Fourth economic plan for the integration of the country in the global economy, and hope for the best on the basis of a genuine belief that time is on the Iranian side.

The argument is that Iran’s massive energy resource (quite a bit of it yet untapped) will ultimately bring the US around and the Iranian economic versatility is sufficiently robust in these days of high oil prices and American troubles in Iraq and Afghanistan to buy Iran’s enough time until that moment arrives.

Yes, they argue, the Iranian economy will continue to be hobbling and inefficient but standing firm against the US will assure that the Islamic will remain an Islamic republic for years to come. If and when the US decides to engage with Iran, they say, it will do so on the basis of what Iran is (i.e., a country in which its hardliners cannot be purged and will continue to play a significant role in its contested politics and economic decision making) and not what the United States thinks Iran should be domestically and in the region.